u/Arrin_Snyders

Hello. After a 6 month trial run I'm planning of fully redoing my system and nukeing the Windows partition and I was considering going for the minimal install so I could have the cleanest possible install with the most control in terms of what software I have installed from the start.

I know I won't have a browser or office suite but none of that particularly concerns me. That's all visible and I can handle installing it all on my own. What I'm mainly interested is the background stuff that I might not be able to see at a first glance or in a test run in a VM, namely codecs and any other stuff that might unexpectedly complicate my life down the line by not being there. I know drivers are part of the kernel and I have an AMD GPU, so that shouldn't be an issue, but I don't know if there might be things I'm not even aware of. I only have 6 months of actual Linux experience to work with.

So, if you've used the minimal install, what were your experiences with it? Did anything come up that wouldn't have on a normal or full install? Or was it just the same with a bit of extra work to set things up at the start? Any advice that might be worth knowing?

The PC is supposed to be a general-purpose one, so some work (mainly with documents), browsing, communication, and gaming.

So, about 6 months ago I decided to dual boot and see if I could move to Linux, and after not having logged in to my Windows partition for around 4 months it's safe to say that I can. So the next step is to nuke the Windows partition entirely and turn my PC fully into a Linux machine. However I have 4 individual drives and I'm not entirely sure how to partition and/or use them all. I have some knowledge of Linux partitioning and asked a chatbot about it as well, but I'd like some feedback from some actual people about my current plan. My goal is to partition things in such a way that should I need to reinstall Linux completely or switch to a different distro I can do so with minimal disruption and loss of data. With that out of the way, here's my drive situation:

1. TeamGroup MP33 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD, has DRAM cache. This one is located in the slot closest to the CPU and is the one best suited for installing the OS. Currently it is home to the Windows install.

2. ADATA Legend 800 2 TB M.2 NVMe SSD, no DRAM cache but has HMB. This one was meant originally just for extra storage and game install space, but currently it also hosts my Linux partition.

3. Samsung 850 EVO SATA SSD, has DRAM cache. This was the OS drive in a previous iteration of my PC. It is nearly a decade old and is at about 52% health according to CrystalDiskInfo and other similar tools.

4. Kingmax 512 GB SATA SSD, no DRAM cache, no HMB. This is a bargain bin SSD I got on a Black Friday sale. It was meant, along with the Samsung, to be part of the Windows side of a dual boot setup I was originally planning before I realized I could in fact go fully Linux. I bought it early because at that time storage costs were already rising and I wanted to get it before it got worse.

Now the PC itself is meant to be a general purpose one, including gaming and the distro I've settled on (and the one I've been testing for the past 6 months) is Kubuntu. I would have preferred Mint and might still switch to it at a later date, but due to my monitor setup I need Wayland and Mint just doesn't support it properly yet. I like KDE, I want a Debian-based distro because that has the widest possible software availability and community support (so Fedora is out, though I was tempted) and while I might tinker here and there if i need to I don't have the time or energy to learn the ins and outs of Linux, so Arch or similar distros are out as well. I also don't want anything immutable since I want to have more freedom in case I need it, even if it comes with some extra risks. This is just to get ahead of the inevitable "you should use this distro actually" comments. I have done my research these past few months and it is a settled question.

Now for the actual partition plan that I need feedback on. It involves completely erasing my existing partitions, including the current Linux one.

1. The goal for the TeamGroup drive is to make it the OS drive for maximum performance as well as for any games that might benefit from the extra speed. As such I decided to go with the following setup:

• a 250 GB system partion with the / mount point, ext4
• a 1 GB /boot/efi partition
• a 48 GB Swap partition
• a 700 GB /home partition, ext 4

My reasoning for the Swap partition is that I have 32 GB of RAM and I used the same minimum recommendation as for the Windows page file (so at least 1.5 times the amount of RAM). This might be too much, so this is one thing I would like feedback on.

The amount I set aside for the system partition is about the same as what I gave to the Windows C: drive. Is this enough or should I allocate more?

The chatbot also recommended I put /var on its own 20 GB partition, but I'm not entirely sure if this is good advice or not.

Another thing I'm not sure of is whether I should use BTRFS anywhere and so far my plan is for everything to be ext4. I know I won't need to roll things back all that often for an Ubuntu install, but I may at times mess something up so I do plan to have Timeshift as well. Should I make the system partition BTRFS? Or should I make a separate BTRFS partition to store the Timeshift backups somewhere? Both? Neither? I have used Timeshift in my current Linux setup to roll back some mistakes twice now, so it doesn't seem to need dedicated BTRFS partitions.

2. The Samsung drive is too small to really install stuff on and too old to trust any sensitive data to, however I have found a use for it. So far I have found that there is exactly one very niche use case where I absolutely need a Windows app. I will only need this in extremely rare circumstances which is why a dual boot setup didn't seem to make sense anymore, but this drive is the perfect place to put a Windows VM, probably using Winboat. It's still a fast drive, so it won't slow down Windows in any way and save me space on a more useful drive.

3. The ADATA drive would be my main storage drive, as well as install space for games that might not be as sensitive to drive speed. I'm not sure how or if I should partition it, or if I should just make folders as needed. On Windows I could move system folders like Downloads, Documents or Pictures onto any drive I wanted, but as far as I know I can't do that on Linux. I think (though I'm not 100% sure this is possible) that I could make a /Downloads, /Documents etc. partition, but then these folders would have a fixed size and I could run into issues later down the line if they get full. Does anyone have any suggestions here? This drive would be ext4.

4. The Kingmax drive is the most redundant one. I don't really need it now that I don't plan a dual boot setup, and while it is new it's also so cheap that I wouldn't trust it with any important data. I will initially leave it NTFS, copy any data I need to keep from the Windows side of the machine before I format everything, then once I've installed Linux I will put all the files in their new home and format it to ext4. Beyond that I have no clue what to do with it. Any suggestions?